See how the sausage is made, Audi style

DanNeil

Dan Neil/The Wall Street Journal

This is the performance, the “S,” version of Audi’s compact premium/entry-luxury crossover, the Q5, with a structure of steel and aluminum over the 110-inch modular wheelbase.he 2014 Audi SQ5 quattro Tiptronic.

Wikipedia is full of accidental wisdom. Under the entry for “sausage,” for example, we find this splendid aphorism: “Sausage making is a logical outcome of efficient butchery.”

Yes! Brilliant. It’s practically a koan of economics: The more efficiently you make something, the less special it is, the more sausage-y it becomes, in consumerism’s weird, three-cornered square dance of desire, rarity and ubiquity. It’s as true for car makers as it is for meatpackers.

Checking out the 2014 Audi SQ5

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What sets the new Audi apart? Dan Neil takes the 2014 Audi SQ5 for a spin and reports back. Photo: Audi.

Those operating profits are due, in part, to VW’s sweeping Modularer Baukasten (“modular toolbox”) production strategy that, while dizzying in execution, is a fairly straightforward drive to increase design/engineering commonality among products in the Group’s eight brands, from Seat and VW to Porsche and Bentley.

For example: Our test car for the week, the 2014 Audi SQ5 (mostly loaded, $64,195), comprises a set of parts conforming to VW’s “modular longitudinal matrix,” the hard points of which are common with Audi sedans, coupes and crossovers, as well as the new Porsche Macan. In fact, the SQ5 shares about a third of its parts with Porsche’s compact crossover.

Honey, do I smell sausage? I love you!

So, yes, first impression: The SQ5 seems to be made of the same breakfast link as other Audi, VW and Porsche products, just cut to the compact crossover length. The aural quality of the cabin is a little brighter, a little less hushed, more hissy, than one might expect of a premium German crossover. Under the Nappa leather, contrasting stitching and pinstripe-aluminum-and-wood inlays, the SQ5 feels like a mega-optioned VW with a slick engine, because it is. It’s not something the casual tire-kicker would notice, but if you drive these cars year after year, you can’t miss it.

The saving grace for Audi? The sausage is still really good.

This is the performance, the “S,” version of Audi’s compact premium/entry-luxury crossover, the Q5, with a structure of steel and aluminum over the 110-inch modular wheelbase. The Q3’s wheelbase is about 8 inches shorter; the Q7 wheelbase is about 8 inches longer. Very orderly product planning.

Here’s a handy mnemonic for the SQ5: five seats, five doors and about 50 grand. The Q5 is Audi’s best-selling model in the U.S., and the SQ5 competes with performance soft-roaders like the Acura RDX with the Tech package, Range Rover Evoque, and Mercedes-Benz GLA45 AMG.

Under the SQ5’s hood is the one of the firm’s flagship gas engines: a direct-injection, supercharged 3.0-liter V6 producing 354 horsepower and a steady 346 lb-ft of torque from about 4,000 to 4,500 rpm. It’s the same engine as in the S4 and S5, sedan and coupe, with software goosed to raise output another 21 hp. Bratty, lusty, eager…these words apply.

By the way, there’s a diesel version of the SQ5, but it’s unavailable in the U.S. Don’t kill the messenger.

The SQ5 is also equipped with a modestly delinquent-sounding active exhaust system. Whenever the engine revs rise above 4,000 rpm, valves behind the quad tailpipes unmute, and the refined gas-powered thrum of the thing blooms into a sonorous cackle.

When the SQ5 goes by in a huff, people talking on cellphones put a finger in their other ear as if in some weird salute.

The blown six is attached to an eight-speed Tiptronic automatic transmission, with manual shifting courtesy of lustrous, pewter-like paddles behind the flat-bottom steering wheel (not shown in picture below). The handgrips molded into this leather-wrapped wheel, the contouring of the frame itself, make it one of my favorite helms in the business. If this steering wheel is a shared part, I say more power to them.

As a driver experience, the SQ5 lives and dies at about 75 mph, in third gear, with the Audi Drive Select switch set to Dynamic mode, the engine fully on the boil and the throttle as touchy as a sunburn. It’s not outrageously fast—that’s because the all-wheel drive crossover is kind of outrageously heavy, at more than 4,400 pounds—but can be nicely snappish, ornery and entertaining, on and off throttle. The chakra here is the transmission software that gives the SQ5 its emotional range. In the default slushbox mode, around town, the throttle is pillowy, deliberate, rousing the engine through gently shuffling upshifts and downshifts.

Audi of America

But as soon as you start to use the shift paddles, the powertrain cops an attitude. This is a learning software, so the car can tell if you want to go quickly within a corner or two. In its feistiest mode (Dynamic with driver-selected gear changes) the SQ5 will resist upshifts while cornering to maintain stability and happily hold revs above 5,000 rpm, with the engine howling. Straight-line upshifts crack off with a shove to the back, and the powertrain parameters start to get very jagged and saw-toothed. Zero-60 mph: 5.1 seconds.

The Audi engineers had a little fun here. In Dynamic mode, at the moment the transmission upshifts under power, the SQ5 lets loose lusty exhaust with back-pressure report—Foom! It’s artificial, or at least it’s exaggerated for effect, to enhance the vividness of the driving experience. I’m actually OK with that.

The car certainly corners emphatically. Among my model’s long list of options were pretty radical 21-inch Dunlop 255/40 sport tires (the standards are 20s), which provided lots of lateral grip before gradually yielding to progressive breakaway. They slide nicely, in other words.

The electromechanical steering system is twitchy in the moment, responsive and direct. Actually, the SQ5’s only real dynamic flaw is revealed just in those few milliseconds of initial turn-in, when the vehicle’s tubbiness, high center of mass and fairly limber roll stiffness (front and rear multi-link suspension) make it feel a little unrestrained, a little less than fully confident. But it quickly finds its feet and off you go.

Is the SQ5 perfect? As much as I love the steering wheel, the little scrolling wheels built into it are too easy to activate inadvertently when you’re driving with one hand, for instance. Other beefs: There’s no USB port. The Sirius satellite radio display highlights the current channel, but the graphic blocks out what the next channel is. The average fuel economy is somewhat alarming: 19 mpg. And why no fuel-saving stop/start function, I wonder?

Perhaps these questions are best left unanswered. No one wants to see the sausage being made.

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